Thursday, September 18, 2008

$35,000/year salary and a $290,000 mortgage

"Cortez makes $35,000 a year and has a poor credit history. Oliver Marquez, a financial counselor at the nonprofit Resurrection Project who advised Cortez, said the original $290,000 mortgage was well beyond his means."

"More recently, some lenders have offered Alt-A loans to people who lacked sufficient documentation to get a traditional loan"

"McLean, Virginia-based Freddie, which reported an $821 million quarterly loss two days ago, said that Alt-A mortgages were the biggest reason for a surge in its foreclosure losses. The delinquency rate for the $190 billion of the loans owned by Freddie or underlying the bonds the company guarantees jumped to 3.7 percent on June 30, from 1.8 percent on Dec. 31"

"For minorities and immigrants, the ownership rate is less than 50 percent and that's what we're focusing a lot on and I think that that's where a lot of the growth in the market will be,'' Freddie Chief Executive Officer Richard Syron said in a interview with Bloomberg Television in 2004."